Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by dispatch contributors Mike Nelson

and David French and dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss

the Trump administration's military campaign against Iran nearly one week in and the administration's

general failure to articulate the why and the why now. We'll also discuss the administration's goals for the campaign

and where we can expect to be in five weeks,

which is what President Trump said this war might take.

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Let's dive in.

Gentlemen, welcome, David.

We are not quite a week into this campaign against Iran.

And I think the big questions over the first several days beyond sort of what we're doing, what we're striking, and what comes next have been two different questions. The why question, why is the United States doing this?

And very closely related, why is the United States doing this now? Yeah. What's your answer to both

of those questions? Yeah, those are really good questions.

And I think you've got really the why and the why now are relatively easy to articulate compared

to the other questions like why not go to Congress, what's the strategy, etc. So the why I think is one of

...